Molouk Y. Ba-Isa Saudi Gazette Every business day at lunchtime and then at the afternoon tea break, Mahmoud can be seen in the lobby of the office where he works, dialing numbers on his mobile phone. Again and again he dials; trying number after number. Once in a while a number answers. Then he walks back and forth in animated conversation. More often, after 15 minutes of dialing he puts his phone away and goes back to work. Mahmoud is a Syrian computer engineer working in Saudi Arabia and the highpoint of his day is if he can manage to get a connection and speak to someone back home. One of 12 brothers and sisters, he is the only one in safety outside Syria. His large family hails from the city of Al Raqqah in north central Syria. “Before the war, less than a million people lived in Al Raqqah,” he said. “But my town is between Aleppo and Dayr az Zawr. When the fighting broke out in those cities, people living there rushed to Al Raqqah. Now there are about two million refugees living in schools, government buildings and the stadium. Every service is stretched beyond the breaking point. The bakeries struggle to make enough bread. There isn't enough petrol so the electricity goes down. Telephone and Internet services are intermittent at best.” It wasn't like this before the war. Al Raqqah was a place where people of many different religions and ethnicities lived prosperously in harmony. Mahmoud's family had landline and Internet service at their house. Everyone had a mobile phone. The ability to communicate at will was something that everyone took for granted, but not anymore. This has been a bad week. Mahmoud hasn't been able to speak to his mother at home or to his brothers on their mobiles. He prefers to call his mother at home on the landline because the connection, when he can get one, is clear. “Speaking to anyone on their mobile is very difficult. Too many people are trying to use the mobile network. It doesn't have enough capacity and it's damaged so there's a lot of static and the conversation is breaking up all the time,” Mahmoud explained. “If I do get through, the person in Syria will speak very quickly at first to convey the most important news because the connection is frequently lost without warning.” Before the war Mahmoud would connect with his family by phone, SMS and chat, but now voice has become the most important. With SMS there's no way to know if the message got through and the Internet is either very slow or nonexistent, so chat is not possible. Al Raqqah's communication network got much worse after the destruction in Aleppo and Mahmoud thinks that essential infrastructure must have been damaged in the fighting. With the cost of everything rising, his family depends on Mahmoud to call them as he is charged at most SR2.8 per minute for each call. From Syria the cost is more than double, at about SR7 to Saudi Arabia. The lack of connectivity is very frustrating for Mahmoud. After three or four days attempting to get a connection without success, he tells himself that he will stop trying until his family calls him. But after a day, in desperation he tries again — just once. Frequently the call doesn't go through and his worry grows. Ten days without a connection is common now. Sometimes when there is no international access to Al Raqqah, the network will still be functional within Syria. Mahmoud has two friends in Damascus and his family may be able to reach them to leave messages for him. It is easier sometimes to place a call to Damascus from Saudi Arabia and so he may get a chance to at least know that his family are well. Mahmoud depends on four friends in Syria for news about the reality of the situation there. While satellite news channels focus on the refugees, of whom there are expected to be one million this year, that still leaves 22 million people living within Syria's borders and trying to cope with the violence, shortages and lack of services. “I don't watch the news anymore,” said Mahmoud. “Every broadcaster has their own agenda. No one gives all the facts. What I see is that no one in this war is one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong. What I also see with certainty is that we are destroying our nation by our own hands.” And so helpless to do anything else, Mahmoud dials. If he gets through, that call will make him happy for a day. The worry will abate for a little while and he can imagine his mother, father, brothers and sisters, safe and sound. It's a small respite until the next day at noon, when he picks up his phone and dials again.
